A Different Approach to Build Systems

Why is it that every web build system needs you to adapt to its way of working? Why do you have to write manifest files, put files into a specific directory structure and do a lot of manual work to have an optimized production build of your web site. If your browser can see the unoptimized assets in your web page, why shouldn’t your build system be able to as well?

This will be a very short presentation of the thoughts and decisions behind the node based web optimization framework assetgraph and a demonstration of some of the features it has. AssetGraph is an extensible, node.js-based framework for manipulating and optimizing web pages and web applications.